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...There are wisps of other plot threads—about how they relate to their
families, feel about aging, and traverse through their careers—but most
of the movie passes without too much incident. And, ultimately, it’s a
genial way to pass a couple of hours. In the film, Brydon complains that
people find his stage persona “affable”—a hard reputation to live up to
in person—but “affable” is the best way to describe the film. It
doesn’t require too much thought; audiences just have to sit back and
let the jokes wash over them. There’s a teeny bit of literary history, a
slight bit of drama, a smattering of food porn, but mostly jokes...

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...If there’s a problem with Obvious Child, it’s born of the movie’s
strengths. It’s a relief to see a movie that doesn’t treat abortion as a
ordeal, and it’s refreshing to see a man in a romantic comedy be an
idealized fantasy object. However, the combination of these two elements
makes the film light on conflict. It’s important to Obvious Child
to keep the abortion regret-free, so once the decision to end the
pregnancy is made, it doesn’t continue to drive the narrative. The focus
shifts to the relationship between Donna and Max, but he never seems to
anger no matter how bad Donna’s behavior gets. Donna goes through ups
and downs on her own accord, but nothing is too extreme...

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In Transcendence,
Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) is introduced as the classic mad
scientist, someone who moves forward with experimental technology
without stopping to consider the consequences. Of course, she has a good
reason to do so: love. Her husband, the brilliant scientist Will Caster
(Johnny Depp), was making breakthroughs in the field of self-aware
artificial intelligence when an anti-A.I. group, Revolutionary
Independence from Technology (R.I.F.T.), assassinates him with
radioactive poisoning. Since it’s such a villainously slow death, Evelyn
has enough time to copy his brain activity and upload his
“consciousness” into the A.I. supercomputer he created. Friend and
fellow scientist Max (Paul Bettany) has reservations about copying
Will’s consciousness and hooking it up to the world’s network of
computers, but Evelyn considers it a sound scientific plan, since a
digital husband is better than no husband at all.

Similarly, on paper, Transcendence seems like it should be good idea. It’s an original sci-fi concept, not based on a pre-existing franchise property. Wally Pfister, longtime director of photography for Christopher Nolan,
chose it as his directorial debut. (In one of the wan bonus features,
someone calls Pfister a veteran with the passion and energy of a
first-timer.) The cast also features members of the Christopher Nolan
Repertory Company, including Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy. With all
of these factors in place, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to expect a
movie on the level of Nolan’s Inception. But, like Dr. Caster’s experiments, Transcendence is much smarter in theory than it is in practice.

Not that the movie should be blamed for trying. Many recent films have focused on Transcendence‘s
two main themes: the practical applications of self-aware artificial
intelligence, and humanity’s relationship to it. Just a few months
before the film’s release, for example, Spike Jonze‘s Her covered similar ground. But while Her focused in an emotional, one-on-one human interaction, Transcendence‘s
view is more macro, centered on the power of A.I. that has access to
the world’s accumulated knowledge in a plugged-in society. Or was it
more of a political view, telling the story of the struggle between the
people who barrel forward with new technology too quickly versus the
people who rally against it entirely? Or is it about whether or not
humans can form a romantic relationship with A.I. created from the exact
neural pathways of someone they once loved? And, if scientists can
create A.I. from the exact neural pathways of a living human, what makes
that A.I. different from the original? In short: What makes us human,
and can it be copied or created?

These are big questions, and Transcendence tries to tackle all of them without ever really getting a bead on any of them...

...It would have been neat if the Blu-ray gave viewers a choice to
either watch the movies as two distinct features in their original
forms, or as a series of shorts that could be accessed separately and
watched in any order. Yet if you want to go from “Sleepy Hollow” to
“Bongo”, you have to stop Ichabod and Mr. Toad, head to the top menu, select Fun and Fancy Free, select play from that menu, and fast-forward through the overlong introductory material with Jiminey Cricket.

Format nitpicking aside—and I realize it is a lot to ask Disney to
slice-and-dice its beloved feature films—this Blu-Ray two-movie
collection has charm to spare. For the most part, the shorts are some of
Disney’s strongest, and taken as a whole they offer a variety of
animation styles, characters and tones...

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...In other words, this is a car movie, one made for people who love cars, and
for people who love other car movies. Enthusiasts get to gawk at
Marshall’s Ford Mustang GT500 and other exotic cars, like a Lamborghini
Sesto Elemento or a Koenigsegg Agera R.

These cars are treated (and shot) with a lot of love. Director Scott
Waugh, in his commentary with Paul, mentions that he favors practical
effects over CGI, and you can tell; the cars have heft and weight to
them, and the most interesting visuals in the film are done in the
service of the driving scenes. The cars are also the subject of most of
the Blu-ray’s features, which do everything from break down the biggest
stunts to analyze the different rumbles that each car makes.

But besides just lavishing attention on the cars, Waugh loves placing
them in the context of other, classic driving movies, from Bullitt to American Graffiti.
In the commentary, Waugh and Paul point out many of these references
(and, yes, video game Easter eggs, too), down to the tiniest background
details. (A stunt coordinator and son of a stunt coordinator, Waugh also
likes to give shout-outs to all of the stunt drivers and their previous
films.) When Bullitt is playing in the background of a drive-in
theater during one of the opening scenes of the film, Waugh mentions
that he was afraid the movie would come across as a period film, since
he puts in so many references to the ‘60s and ‘70s...

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...We follow Laura as she drives around the streets of Glasgow in a van,
luring and seducing men into her orbit, often to their detriment. For
these scenes, Glazer uses a series of non-actors in largely improvised
environments; the van is outfitted with up to 10 hidden-camera setups.

The result of these conditions—regular people having unscripted
conversations in a natural setting without cameras reminding them
they’re being filmed—should be naturalistic. However, they don’t
entirely feel this way. While these scenes do feel authentic, Glazer
heightens the action beyond the typical found-footage-style documentary.
His images are more beautiful than something you’d expect from
dashboard cameras. He also sets the scenes to a discordantly beautiful score by Mica Levi. You can feel the disconnect between Laura and the rest of humanity; everything feels distant and unsettled.

This is largely to the credit of Johansson. She’s capable of
telegraphing both seduction and isolation simultaneously. She connects
with the men she meets on the street, but you can tell that there’s an
emotional disconnect. While there is dialogue throughout the film,
Johansson is essentially giving a silent performance. The words that
pass between her and the men are of no consequence to the arc of the
film; they’re just to get the men in the van. The emotional core of the
story—which comes more and more into focus as the film progresses—is
almost entirely advanced through Johansson’s face...

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The love story should be the heart of Winter’s Tale, but the
movie is frequently caught up in the more supernatural elements of the
story, and everything is consumed in its spiritual mumbo-jumbo. For
example, at least two different characters are pressed into service to
explain that Lake’s horse is “actually a dog”—specifically Athansor, the
“Dog of the East”—that just sometimes takes the form of a horse. This
information never comes to bear in the rest of the entire movie, as
Athansor never appears as a dog; it’s just magical nonsense.

It’s not just background nonsense, either; the movie goes out of its
way to play up its spiritual angle. Light and its mystical properties,
for example, is a major theme of the movie. Instead of just being a
recurring visual motif, though, Goldsman makes sure the light is always
front-and-center. This results in something onscreen twinkling right
before an awe-inspiring event happens. It’s a constant primer that the
audience doesn’t actually need.

The magical elements of the story come at the expense of developing
real characters. By the time a second set of major characters is
introduced in the 2014 timeline, Winter’s Tale doesn’t have
enough time left to get invested in them as people. Instead, they become
just another set of mystical objects in Lake’s quest for miracles.

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...All of this happens in what is basically the prologue to the actual
events of the film, which show how the squeaky-clean Ryan, following his
injury, is recruited into the CIA, first as a data analyst at a
financial firm in New York City, and then as an agent on his first field
assignment to avert an act of financial terrorism in Russia. As Ryan
progresses up the ranks of the CIA, though, the story doesn’t get any
more nuanced. Ryan is always the most observant, most competent, most
morally upstanding guy in the room. The Americans are the good guys; the
Russians are the villains. It is, like its airport-novel origins,
pretty boilerplate.

For something so formulaic, though, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is at least well done. Director Kenneth Branagh borrows from the best of recent thrillers. He throws in a Bourne-style fight scene here, a Mission:Impossible break-in-and-heist-sequence there, and some Zero Dark Thirty-like
data analysis, along with a dash of his own classic, theatrical
flourishes. (Branagh takes on the role of Russian baddie Viktor
Cherevin, a cold-blooded killer who still makes time to talk about the
novels of Mikhail Lermontov.)

With each of these sequences, Branagh changes his filmmaking style to match. The Bourne-like
fistfight also borrows its director’s affinity for the shaky, handheld
camera aesthetic. The longer heist scene has more fluid camera movements
and quick cuts to ratchet up the tension. Throughout, Branagh makes
everything sparkle: fluorescent lights of a city, reflections on smooth
surfaces of modern architecture, blinking lights of a computer message.
The elements of the story may be familiar, but everything looks shiny
and new.

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Taken all together, Lizzie Borden Took an Axe is unsatisfying on
every level. It doesn’t dig deep enough to make Borden a deliciously
evil villain that still inspires some loyalty, like Hannibal Lecter or
Joe Carroll. The procedural elements detailing the trial amount to
dueling monologues from the prosecution and defense, making them more
dry than dramatic. (And shallow, too: You see the hoards of press and
gawkers at the trial, but their impact is never explored.) It doesn’t
shed any new light on the century-old case. And the camp doesn’t go
over-the-top enough to fulfill any kind of cheesy midnight-movie
craving.

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On the surface, it seems like The Spectacular Now is no different from your average teen movie. It starts off at an Atlanta, Georgia high school sometime during senior year. The all-around popular guy, Sutter (Miles Teller), meets the pretty-but-unnoticed shy girl, Aimee (Shailene Woodley). They strike up an unlikely friendship, then an even-more-unlikely romance, and then have to figure out what to do about the world after high school.

In the hands of James Ponsoldt —adapting the novel by Tim Tharp—what could easily become your typical end-of-high-school love story becomes something much harder to create: a teen movie that resembles real life more than other teen movies. In Ponsoldt’s commentary and a handful of behind-the-scenes featurettes included in the Blu-ray, Ponsoldt says he was striving for authenticity and, for the most part, he achieves it.

Teller and Woodley, along with the rest of the cast, look and talk like real teenagers. Their clothes are worn and wrinkled and look like they were bought at Target. They sweat when it’s supposed to be hot out, and things like pimples and scars aren’t airbrushed out or caked over with makeup. (The authenticity spills over into the location as well; an Atlanta native, Ponsoldt notes in his commentary that he wanted to show off the city the way the locals see it, by including, say, his favorite college record store as opposed to the usual tourist attractions.) ...

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Marisa LaScala

Based out of Brooklyn and Westchester, I am a freelance writer and an editor for an upscale regional lifestyle magazine located just outside of New York City. To contact me about freelance projects, e-mail mlascala@gmail.com.